Fear of Fire and Shadow (The Fade #1) - Samantha Young Page 0,69

I will not stand for.” Abruptly, he turned and jerked his reins, galloping over the bridge and into the village, unmindful of his surprised Guard who took off after him.

Wolfe had just betrayed the intimacy between us by using my given name.

It was with a mixture of relief and pain I realized Wolfe had had enough and was no longer speaking to me. He returned to camp some few hours later and told Chaeron what had happened. I tried to eavesdrop, but the collective snoring of the Guard drowned out their voices.

The next morning, Wolfe refused to look at me, let alone speak to me, and as we moved off away from the village, I had to ask Chaeron for the details of Wolfe’s venture into the village.

Apparently, Den Hewitt had not exaggerated. After investigation, Wolfe discovered the manager of the mine, a wealthy baron no less, was working the villagers to the bone to keep up with the competition from the local mining communities surrounding them. Discovering sick children and ill workers, worn out and hopeless, Wolfe was furious. The village had had two deaths in the last month caused by exhaustion and dehydration.

He fined the manager (and Den Hewitt) and threatened him with criminal charges if he did not return to the normal working procedures. To ensure his obedience, Wolfe left two of his men to guard the workers and sent a messenger to Vojvodkyna Winter Rada explaining the situation. He asked her to send some of her men to relieve the Royal Guardsmen and to assign a replacement manager for the mine.

I rested easier knowing Wolfe had taken care of it. I had known he would. I sighed wearily and stared straight ahead, worrying about what we would find in the next village we passed through. I had so much to tell Haydyn once she was awake and well. Our problem wasn’t just the evocation. Our problem was that outside the cities governed by the Rada, the people were ignored and left to go about their business. Those with power took advantage of those with none. That had to change.

I straightened my spine with determination.

When this journey was over and my task complete, parts of Phaedra would need reform.

Chapter 21

To my utter relief, the next few days through Daeronia passed uneventfully. We stopped in two other mining communities, and neither was suffering under the conditions of the first. From their disposition to the state of their homes and their fervent hospitality, they were fire to the southern coal mining village’s ice.

And I? I was confused. Perhaps I had merely wanted to put the prior manager’s attitude partly down to Haydyn’s evocation, but the northern coal miners were wonderful in manner, and surely if the waning of the evocation was part of the problem, then they would be the ones to feel the effects more so than the south.

My forehead was in a perpetual state of wrinkles.

The situation with Wolfe hadn’t changed. In fact, it had worsened. He had Lieutenant Chaeron pass along anything he wished me to know, and the night we dined in the home of the manager of a large coal mining town called East Winds, Wolfe flirted with their twenty-year-old daughter and ignored my existence.

I ignored the fist of agony in my chest. His behavior was of my own making and I had no right to feel anything toward him.

We had been following the River Cael and were closing in on the border between Daeronia and Alvernia. A constant knot of anxiety now lived in my stomach, the need to get to the Pool of Phaedra an obsession, sharp and unrelenting. I was impatient when Wolfe stopped us by the river for our midday break and was about to voice my disgruntlement when I remembered I hadn’t spoken to him for three days. Plus, it was unseasonably hot, not even a wisp of that crisp Daeronian breeze I had come to love.

I told Chaeron I needed a moment alone and wandered along the bank of the river that flowed on the left side of the trade road as the men gathered near the woodland on the right. They stopped, sliding down to lean against tree trunks and eat the hard biscuits that had come to form their unsatisfying daily diet.

I was still in sight, but I used the horse to cover me as I took off my shoes and stockings to dangle my feet into the river. I sighed at the blissful cold water